What is an import and where is it on the hard disk

[Jeff Shannon]

In article <3CC4A51A.A7D770ED at sympatico.ca>, 
francis049 at sympatico.ca says...
> I receive an error message like :
> 
>     Traceback (innermost last) :
>     File : /usr/sbin/up2date, line 9, in ?
>       import rpm
>     Import error : No module named rpm
> 
> 
> Anyone can tell me why is this error happening and give me some details
> ... please ?
 
As Geoff Gerrietts said, it's hard to tell exactly *why* this 
happened when there's no detail given about when or where this 
error occurred.

For an explanation of what import is, and what it means, read the 
Python tutorial chapter on modules, here:

    http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node8.html

The error you got implies that there is no rpm.py file in any of 
the directories in your sys.path.  This could be because the file 
is missing, or it could be because your path is bad.
 
Red Hat uses Python 1.5.2 for a number of its system utilities, 
and expects to be able to access that version from 
/usr/bin/python.  Perhaps the most likely scenario here, is that 
you've upgraded Python so that /usr/bin/python is now Python 2.x, 
and the new version of Python doesn't search the old version's 
site-lib for Red Hat's tools.  (Some of those tools are broken 
under 2.x anyhow...)  You can verify this as Geoff suggested, by 
checking the version of python with this shell command:

    $ python -c "import sys; print sys.version"

If this does not show version 1.5.2, then you'll want to remove 
the current version of python, restore 1.5.2 (which may be as 
simple as deleting /usr/bin/python and recreating it as a link to 
/usr/bin/python15, or may require reinstalling the RPM), and then 
installing the new version of python from Red Hat's latest 
python2 RPMs.  This will create the new version as 
/usr/bin/python2, and both can coexist (though you'll need to run 
your scripts as 'python2 myscript.py').

-- 

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International